


A Bus Going Elsewhere

by TiamatisObscure



Category: Original Work
Genre: Ambiguous Plot, Ehhh..., Gen, Implied Neglect, Is this... just about a bus stop?, Purple Prose, Surrealism, This was supposed to be about more than it is right now...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-19
Updated: 2018-01-19
Packaged: 2019-03-06 15:23:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13414107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TiamatisObscure/pseuds/TiamatisObscure
Summary: There is a bus stop at the end of the road.





	A Bus Going Elsewhere

**Author's Note:**

> I mostly wrote this just to write. Don't expect more than that. Maybe someday it will have a plot. I just wanted some feedback. So if you have feedback, please share it with me. Thanks for reading!

There is a bus stop at the end of the road.

I walk to it, some days, past the hedges covered in perfumed flowers and the tidy lawns. I walk beyond them, beyond the smooth concretes and flawless asphalt of town, beyond the harried mothers with strollers and the children chasing each other through the streets. I walk beyond all the ephemera of civilization, the trappings of suburbia. I leave it all behind.

Now the concrete and asphalt are gravel and dirt. My only companions are rustles in the brush, strident birdsong, and the dull crunch of gravel and sand under boots. No matter how many times I have walked this path, I have never been able to find the stop before dusk. I’ve never found the bus stop at any time other than dusk, actually.

The first time I found the bus stop, I’d been walking since noon. Summer days are long, sticky with heat and buzzing with life, and so my vision was swimming with fatigue by the time I saw the letters on the sign. The mushrooms and soft pine needles blanketing the earth beyond the road colored it in deep browns and shadows. The sky darkened quickly, night brushing indigos and violets across dusky oranges and reds. Mars peeked bright through the trees, the first of the planets to rise. An omen, some might call it. An ill omen. An omen of war and chaos and death.

Thankful for the free seating beneath the sign, I sat, resting my shaky-tired legs. I didn’t know what kind of bus would be coming down this road, but I was glad that they’d thought to put a stop in, if only because I was sweaty and hot and exhausted. Now that I was seated, though, I felt chilled. There was a stiff breeze, cooling the sweat on my skin. But the woods were silent. Not a rustling leaf, not a cracking branch, not a chirp or whistle or caw. Just… silence.

The silence unnerved me. I stood, and turned to look up and down the road. The silence filled my skull, sunk under my skin, until my world was the sound of my breath hissing between my teeth and the quickening drum of my heartbeat.

Th-thump-th-thump-th-thump. 

Then, in the distance. The sound of hooves. Drumming in time with my heart. Speeding up. 

The trees seemed to curl over the street, inky tendrils of shadow spreading slick from slim branches. The wind blew harshly, picking up dust and grit that stung my skin, my lips, my eyes.

I closed my eyelids against the onslaught.

When I opened them, there was the bus. It was a pale Greyhound, glowing ghostly under the full, white moon. It seemed almost elegant, like it was meant to be in motion, even as it thrummed in place. The windows were shiny like the carapace of a beetle, and just as opaque. There was an antler decal all around the door, and stylized hounds chased deer across the sides, below the windows. The doors hissed open.

I broke from my trance and ran. I would not return for months.

That was my first encounter with the bus going elsewhere.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

I’ve never spoken of the bus. Not to anyone. I assume that every other person who has seen the bus in the night is the same. We’re the only ones who know that it exists. No one who is called by the bus comes back different enough to get noticed and investigated. Or, perhaps, no one who is called has anyone to notice how different they come back. I certainly didn’t.

And I know for certain that no one who rides will ever come back from elsewhere to spill its secrets.

It would be many months after my first encounter when I returned to the bus stop at the end of the road. The world had sickened and browned into fall, before finally giving into the cold peace of winter late in November. The days were short and cold, the nights long and dark and bitter, cutting with icy razors at all foolish enough to leave the safety of their houses.

The woods were different. Cooler. Quieter.

The shadows, longer.

The cold, deeper.

The bus… the same.

I, like the woods I traveled through, had changed. When before, I ran, now, I stayed. I watched as the bus ghosted to a halt. I watched as the doors opened before me, spilling the scent of warm honey, of sweet cinnamon, of rosemary into the air. The interior of the bus was obscured behind silver light too bright to examine closely, but I could hear the clink of coins and the rustle of cloth floating out on the honey-spice scented air. I did not run, but I did not step beyond the silver veil either. I had not changed that much yet.  
After moments, the bus was gone, vanishing between one blink and the next.

I walked back to the house that I had come from.

Back to the suburbs.

Back to a cold house. An empty house. A house not warmed by light and laughter and love. A house consumed by winter even as the trees blossomed and fruited. 

A house that was not my home.

My guardians did not intend my loneliness. They doubtless assumed that, as a boy of seventeen, I was grateful for the separation they put between us. But I was not. I was a boy of seventeen trapped in winter, mourning for parents lost, frozen from the moment I knew onwards. My guardians had assumed that I had unthawed sometime that summer, that I would go back to my school and my friends and my empty empty house. That I would move on. That I would heal. I did not. I subsisted. I drifted. I floated on the flow of everyday life, like a chunk of ice on spring floodwaters. Once belonging, now apart. No rhyme. No reason. Just ice on the river. Not belonging.  
The friends that were once close had moved on. The schoolwork that was once engaging had ceased to have a hold on me. I couldn’t bring myself to care.

Adrift. Cold. Lonely. Detached. A marvel of a boy, sculpted entire from ice.

I suppose that’s why They took an interest.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

I visited the bus stop often, after my first taste of the honey-sweet air inside. I waited for it every evening. I performed experiments, testing how long I could get the bus to stay, seeing if it would come at any time other than dusk, attempting to entice the passengers to leave. The rest of the world faded into nonexistence, and the bus became my obsession.

It was like siren song, alluring, inspiring, and with an undertone of danger. I could write again, with the rhythm of hooves below the tapping of keys. I could think again, with the memory of honey on crisp, piny air. I could breathe, but only while the apparition lured me forwards.

I would take the final step past the doors of the bus in mid-May.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

This particular evening is rainy. Dreary and desolate and heavy, the rainfall bruises the white flowers on the dogwoods and powerwashes the streets. My sandaled feet leap puddles and crunch on shiny dark gravel.

Again, the end of the road is my destination.

This time, though, I am not afraid of the unknown.

Or, perhaps, that is not true.

But the bus is not unknown to me, not anymore. Not the hooves, not the honey, not the silver veil.

I had familiarized myself with the bus over months of examination, and, in the process, I had lost my familiarity with the simple rhythms of suburbia. No longer do I understand the mothers and their children, the cut-grass smell of manicured lawns, the simple wooden doorways of the home that is not mine.

Again, I run from the unknown.

Again, the gravel crunches under my feet.

Again, the woods are silent, the light leaving the sky, the shadows clutching ‘round my own like comforting hands, the beating of my heart drowning out the world.

Again, the bus comes, bringing with it the honey scent, the drumming hooves, the silvered veil.

This time, I step through.


End file.
